Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
July 8, 2014
432 pages
add to Goodreads/buy from Book Depo/or Amazon
**Contains some spoilers for Icons (Book 1) - see my review here**
The Icons came from the sky. They belong to an inhuman enemy. They ended our civilization, and they can kill us.
Most of us.
Dol, Ro, Tima, and Lucas are the four Icon Children, the only humans immune to the Icon's power to stop a human heart. Now that Los Angeles has been saved, things are more complicated - and not just because Dol has to choose between Lucas and Ro, the two great loves of her life. As she flees to a resistance outpost hidden beneath a mountain, Dol makes contact with a fifth Icon Child, if only through her visions. When Dol and the others escape to Southeast Asia in search of this missing child, Dol's dreams, feelings and fears collide in an epic showdown that will change more than just four lives -- and stop one heart forever.
In this riveting sequel to Icons, filled with nonstop action and compelling romance, bestselling author Margaret Stohl explores what it means to be human and how our greatest weakness can be humanity's strongest chance at survival.
Last year in the Icons series' first book, Icons, we met Dol, Rom, Lucas, Tima, the Icon Children. They live in a world where unseen beings known as the Lords came from the sky and killed the majority of humanity, leaving the Icons - towering machine like things that people fear and cannot approach - around the world.
On the run now, after saving Los Angeles from its Icon, they're taken far away from the world they knew - where they grew up and base where they'd been.
Their journey develops the story that was a bit confusing for me in the first book. As they encounter new places and people, we find both some answers and deeper questions. I felt like I was missing a lot of the intricacies of the world in Icons. I didn't have that same feeling here. We already know the 'big picture' information from Icons and can now see more of how that fits into the characters, their lives and the world.
The bits of correspondence interspersed between the chapters tells a parallel story that can slowly be pieced together as the novel progresses. By the end, an amazing bit of information is revealed that will likely change readers view of at least one character. The communication by machines is, actually, one of my favorite parts of the story.
The way things are pieced together and the impact of different events and characters, both past and present, is really fantastic.
There is still a bit of a disconnect for me with the characters, but less than in the first book (I'm about eighty to eight-five percent with them, here). Ro, at times, seemed like he could have been Link's (from Stohl and Kami Garcia's Beautiful Creatures and Dangerous Creatures series) brother. They have personalities that, at times, are a bit similar while still vastly different. I really liked him in this book. Tima, also, was a great surprise. She was my favorite character in the book.
Now that many of my questions from the first book have been explained - either by new information given, discovered or by reading more of the Icons world - I am enjoying the characters more and, especially, after that ending I am looking forward to more in this series.
(Also: For some reason, I kept picturing one character as Abzorbaloff from Doctor Who . . . )
received from publisher, through NetGalley, for review
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